 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, we're here at Howard Boeville who's the head of hybrid cloud platform for IBM. Been in the industry for many, many decades as a practitioner heading up organizations now at IBM, heading up the hybrid cloud. Howard, great to have you on theCUBE. Pleased to be here, John. Thank you for your time. Can you tell us a little bit about the digital transformation trends that you've seen in the past year as they have clearly shook the industry? Certainly COVID, no one would have predicted provisioning VPN access or remote access for all the employees. I'm sure that wasn't on anyone's radar but many more other disruptions and opportunities for accelerating these new, what are now obvious benefits. Can you take your time to explain what you've seen? Yeah, sure. There's been a huge amount of acceleration of digital transformation. So VPN projects, as you mentioned, the people working from home, projects that in the past were taking many, many years to work through, then got done literally in weeks. And they're very complex when you get under the skin of them. And companies therefore saw confidence in that and started to look at broader digital transformations. And you can kind of think about them in terms of their successes and their failures or the lessons learned from them. So when it's done right, what I've observed from companies that have done it right, they've done it from a business process perspective. They looked at their business processes that they want to transform as opposed to just the underpinning technology. But the companies that have been around for a while have also then understood that legacy is a problem. So God created the earth or the world in seven days but that's because he didn't have any legacy to deal with. So as companies have taken the confidence for the smaller projects to work through, they've found in these larger ones where they've got legacy environments to work through, digital transformation is still very important but it's not as straightforward as they thought it might be. You know, one of the things that's coming out of the hybrid cloud discussion is a couple of things. One is everyone now agrees that this is the standard and multicloud soon around the corner. Hybrid cloud is an operating model and it's a new kind of operating system with the ability to use Kubernetes and containers and microservices and other service meshes to integrate legacy. This is huge. What's the biggest pain points that you're seeing from an adoptions standpoints that are blockers from clients? What's getting in the way of the obvious now path with hybrid cloud? Well actually, first and foremost, the position that IBM has created by kind of calling out hybrid cloud where companies will be on-premise and off-premise because of legacy gave CIOs around the world the huge sigh of relief. And having sat in their seats, I often thought I must be the dumbest person in the room because I don't understand this full-on public cloud model because I can't see the benefits to my shareholders that would deliver. I could see it to the pure player cloud service providers but not to myself. So talking to CIOs, I think thank heavens for that we're no longer seen as a lidite when we're explaining that we'll be on-premise and off-premise and it'll be heterogeneous environments we're operating within. But the simple way to think about the blockers and actually it's in a nice job yourself, John, in terms of explaining this is cloud is simply another resource pool that you use to run your applications or your data sets on. And in the past, you had nicely curated environments when it was in your own environment but there are benefits that you can get by using more nascent technologies like cloud particularly around developer productivity. But in chapter one of cloud with the pure player cloud providers, it was kind of a carbuncle that you kind of put onto the side of your organization which then became very difficult this kind of Frankenstein's monster of peace parts to put together from an IT operations and a cybersecurity perspective. Okay, so you talk about this Frank in cloud model before I've heard that come from you. What is this about? You just referenced it there. What is the Frank in cloud? Yeah, it's the simple way to think about it is in the old world when you ran all of your applications your data sets, your developers in your own data sensors you would create a curated model that would allow you to run it very strongly from an architectural perspective what's a different legacy environments but the actual architect you put around it would be clean and the IT operational environments would be clean and the actual cybersecurity controls. You put on a third party capability whether that's a cloud service provider or a software as a service provider and you add a world of complexity where you have no controls over those environments and you're certainly not driving the architectural standards. So you're putting together these peace parts in the same way as Dr. Frankenstein put together that the monster that he created and ultimately that will turn upon you. It will create technical operational issues it will create economic issues and it absolutely will create cybersecurity issues. So the important thing to think about on these digital transformations is the architecture in a hybrid context is one that will work for you with a multi-cloud environment whether that's from a software as a service provider or from a cloud service provider. It's interesting you bring up these other turning on you kind of the Franken cloud, I get that but let's bring that up to the positive. A client, a customer might say, hey, you know, I did a great job of moving into the public cloud I brought some stuff on hybrid, oh my God we've got to push some new stuff and then push new code and then things breaks. They call this day two operations or as you guys are referring to AI ops these are opportunities. So how does a company get their arms around that because that's going to be the next progression. Okay, I'm operating on a distributed basis, right? Great, I got an edge, data center, whatever but now I'm pushing code all the time. I don't want it to break. Yeah, I mean most of my comments John are based upon the experiences and the mistakes that I've made in my career. So that element that you talked about there to operations, not only are we going through an inflection point in terms of the technologies that are used and the architectures and the technical level you have to put together the silicon that you think about, you've got to really think about the carbon, the people and the IT operating model that you have because a lot of the actual manual work you did and previously will be done in an automated fashion so an AI fashion. So any transformation program needs to look at the actual transformation of the skills of the people you have working for you and they shouldn't feel fearful that it's a place where they actually won't have a role. They just won't have a role with the current skill sets they've got but there are adjacent skill sets that you can have that they can actually be trained into or gather on assignments where they get the experience to operate in that fashion. Yeah, I'd love to get the comment on the edge with S system on a chip, SOC as it's called as more and more capabilities are going to be at the edge. But I want to stay on this quick cloud thing on FrankenCloud because one of the things that I see with the positives of cloud is is that okay, it can be more agile but then I get worried that if I'm going too fast I might break something and get fired. I got all this compliance, I don't want to get sued or there's all kinds of regulations now and compliance around distributed clouds globally. So what's your take on that? What specific challenges do these companies face when they're either in regulated industries or don't want to go too fast? They got to watch that data and make sure it's not going to be misused. Yeah, so the philosophy that we have at IBM is different to chapter one and the pure player cloud providers, which is we believe if you build the actual compliance controls in from the outset and have them as a standard of consumption for all the customers, they can actually accelerate their adoption of clouds. So they can actually get to the benefits of cloud productivity, innovation far more quickly. And that's been evidenced by chapter one where all large institutions in multiple year programs spend tens of millions of dollars and are building the compliance controls themselves. You don't do that with IBM. You get that out of the box for the entire industry. We keep that fresh and current and vibrant going forward. So those non-functional requirements are no longer a consideration for you and you can then focus your energy, your developers, in terms of the actual points of innovation on the functional capabilities that you can provide. I want to get your reaction to something and you comment if you don't mind. I mean, there's been a big trend of data clouds built on other people's clouds and you got the needs of specialty and industries or vertical needs. Do you see the need or do you see a path for specialty clouds or vertical clouds specifically as the AI and data can be relative to these verticals but you want at the same time, horizontal scalability for data plane or data access. What's your take on specialty clouds? Yeah, I mean, that's at the heart of the thesis and the idea that we have here at IBM which is there is a need for specialty clouds of particular industries and their workloads. And really, people look back in the very near future and I'll say that's an evident thing because again in the old world when it was in your own data center you would have build types for specific types of applications and the processes that it supported and the risk posture of that and then the associated data sets. So the capabilities that we built within our global availability zones is for the large enterprises and that's an area that's obviously at IBM's heritage. And then it's not just the software level, it's the hardware it runs on. So IBM provides the hardware from a main frame power, X86. So for all those kind of form factors and an operating system level, obviously through Linux in terms of the capabilities that we have. So we can meet all of that stack but build them specifically for the applications and the data sets for the industries that we serve and the AI capabilities necessary. That's great stuff. I want to take your take on shift gears to cybersecurity. I mean, every time you look there's a headline of a breach, solar winds had more implications than anyone could imagine. Do you hire more firefighters to put out the fire? Do you make fire resistant materials? I mean, there's an optimization balance. What do you think is the best way to prevent cyber breaches going forward? What's your take on this? I'm sure you're gonna appreciate it. So in the world of cybersecurity it's all of the above and then many more because you've got to put checks and balances in terms of every capability having kind of come from an environment where my old bank was named after the country that it was in and therefore nation states would take great delight in terms of trying to breach the area. So all of those controls are necessary as you put them in. But the other element to think about on digital supply chains is again, if you actually have your supply chain on a cloud that has the compliance controls built in, they benefit and inherit that as well. Whereas if you don't, you've got to actually ensure that they are actually attesting to the controls. The cloud that we built here at IBM gives you continuous monitoring to show that those software as a service providers are actually adhering to the controls you want in real time. That is a massive game changer in terms of then the logging information we can provide to customers to show that their digital supply chain does not become compromised. Real quick, while I got you here as cyber standards become around hybrid, the early responses were specialized on AWS, Azure or Google and they pick one or have a backup cloud and build your teams around that, your developer teams. Does that shift with hybrid? How does CSOS change with hybrid? Yeah, so the benefit in terms of the entry to IBM has in the cloud space, which is probably in terms of the current variance, two years old, is that we're not dealing with legacy. So we're kind of learning from the mistakes of these older cloud providers that have got a wealth of legacy in their environments, both at the actual hardware level, but also the code base level, some more so than others in terms of the issues they have with their code base. And therefore with the AI ops and the actual cybersecurity tools that we put in place, we're building upon the bad experiences they've had, but also other intelligence that we get in terms of threat vectors as they come through John. Howard, in the last question to end the segment, you've led a lot of digital transformation initiatives through your career. What have you found has been the best practice that applies now as companies are coming out of COVID, they want to have a growth strategy, want to make sure the foundation's in place, that's solid that they can build upon. What's your lessons learned? What's your best practice advice? So you've got to deal with the difficult problems first that sometimes are fundamental to get to pairs. So controls appears to be a fairly mundane topic, but unless you can deal with the controls, you can't actually get the accelerated pace. And then when you do these transformations, you have to bring your people along with you at the same time as you're transforming the technology. So you need the silicon to be allied with the carbon. And then you get people that are actually changed hungry as opposed to change resistant. Howard Boval, thanks for coming on theCUBE, head of hybrid cloud platforms at IBM. Thanks for joining us today. You're welcome, thank you, John. Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE for IBM Think 2021 coverage. Thanks for watching.